From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble: Kant and Aristotle on Morally Good Action

Abstract

Philosophers have long supposed that Aristotle and Kant disagree about many fundamental issues in moral philosophy. Aristotle tells us that an agent lacks virtue unless he enjoys the performance of virtuous actions, while in the Groundwork Kant seems to claim that the person who does her duty in the teeth of contrary inclination displays an especially high degree of moral worth. Aristotle argues for the virtuous life by attempting to prove that, given the human telos, some form of the virtuous life is the happiest that we can live. Kant scorns appeals to happiness as irrelevant to morality and bids us remember the special vocation of an autonomous being. Aristotle emphasizes the difficulty of formulating general principles of action, and the important role of judgment and perception in practical deliberation. Kant, on the other hand, provides us with a method for testing proposed maxims to see whether their actions are permissible, forbidden, or required. And finally, Aristotle has been lately been categorized as a ‘virtue theorist’ who holds that an action’s value consists in its being the expression of a virtue; while Kant is supposedly a deontologist who thinks that the value of an action rests in its conformity to a rule.